Stages of grieving online

On Christmas Day a few years back, I was trolling Facebook, tired, stuffed, looking for some amusing posts from friends, and I saw the terrible news: one of my grade school classmates lost her husband on Christmas Eve. Suicide. At first, I thought to myself “how could she put something so tragic and utterly personal on Facebook?” But then I saw the comments. Dozens of people had rallied behind her, supporting her in her darkest hour of need. Suddenly her decision became a brave one in my mind. It took courage for her to share what she did, how she did. Over the following days and weeks, that community held her up and kept her going for her children.

Last summer, one of my blogger friends lost her mother quite suddenly. Her mom had been through a lot – cancer, treatments, remission – they thought she was doing well, and then in an instant, she was gone. But because my friend had such a strong online support system, she immediately shared the news, allowing her friends to lift her up and help her through it. January 13th of this year, I had found myself in the unfortunate position where I had to make the choice of whether to share similar news. My father died very suddenly.

Stage 1 – Do Nothing

Through the fog of emotion, I didn’t want to believe it. It wasn’t deep denial, because I’d seen him on the brink of death before, at age 10, attached to tubes in a hospital suffering from severe post polio syndrome. One doesn’t forget that kind of image. Still, we all thought he was doing so well. I had spoken with him a few days earlier. He emailed me a link to a documentary that morning. Then I got the phone call. So as I thought through all of this shock, I couldn’t bring myself to type the words “my dad died.” They seemed so wrong, so foreign, forbidden. Even now it still feels uncomfortable to say.

Stage 2 – E-mail and the Inner Circle

I paced around the house nervously for a while, talked on the phone with family members for many hours, and finally, I had to decide how to share the news with others. Since we needed to travel, I had to tell people I work with next so they could plan. Enter e-mail. I may have sent a few private messages on Twitter. It’s all a blur now. I passed through anger quickly and there wasn’t anything really to bargain for – the only thing I wanted – my dad to be alive – couldn’t be bargained for with him already gone. So instead I wrote a long, detailed e-mail message to our immediate family about why I felt lucky to have had extra time with him. Well aware that he was spared in 1983, I tried to focus on being thankful for the time we had together.

Stage 3 – Facebook Status

Pretty soon, somebody had sent a condolence note with an @sairy in the clear, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before it was on my Facebook page. So I made the choice – as with professional new media campaigns – to control my message and to post there first myself so that it wouldn’t be sensationalized, so that people could have all of the information I had, etc.. I posted what I knew as succinctly as possible: he died earlier in the day, it was sudden, and we would be posting more information about the cause and the funeral when we had it. I made sure to post on his Facebook wall so that people would have the information there too. I didn’t have his password. Now I know there are sites where people can store that information for their families, but eventually I got ahold of it.

Stage 4 – The Wall

What happened next still humbles me today. I received a few hundred public and private messages on Facebook and Twitter from friends and colleagues over the course of two days as they read what happened. That kindness translated to offline action as well. (Of course it should – I know this from years of working in this field – but it’s never been about me. It was always for a client, a cause, a campaign.) Friends brought me food, they offered babysitting help, and many just wanted me to know they were there if I needed anyone to talk to. Suddenly, I was a member of a sad new club of people who had lost one or two parents – people who knew how awful I felt, and who didn’t expect me to look or act any particular way – they just wanted to be next to me in my grief. To them I owe a debt of gratitude. I couldn’t thank everyone individually who wrote on my Wall, but I did what I could and saved all of the messages.

Stage 5 – Website

My dad didn’t have much of an online presence. He retired before the web, and his private pursuits since retirement were limited to e-mail. But he liked the idea of leaving a virtual legacy behind. And he explored sites that did this, and related places like legacy.com, where obituaries are saved from newspapers (for a price, of course). As a lawyer, he was also an excellent writer, and he liked the idea of being able to leave something tangible about oneself behind. So being the social media and tech go-to gal in the family, I took it upon myself to grab his domain name and built a basic website. It’s still a work in progress, and it may be transferred over time, but it’s there, it includes a couple of things that he wrote himself, and I like to think he would have appreciated the effort.

Stage 6 – Photos & Video

The days following his death, I spent a lot of time looking at photos of my dad to feel closer to him after he was gone, but there was also an urgent need to put together a photo slide show for the memorial service, and although no one would have thought less of it without the photos, everyone in our family wanted to have something to show, so we began digging through images everywhere we could find them. We bought a high quality photo scanner and mass scanned old family photos late into the night in order to build a video that could be presented. Unfortunately, I have yet to come across any videos with my dad in them, but I’m sure I will at some point. Regardless, the process had a healing effect and everyone who attended the service liked seeing the slide show.

Stage 7 – Blog

For someone who loves to write, my creative energy was completely depleted for a month. Living in a fog, days were running together and I couldn’t remember who I had called and what I had said. The physical exhaustion that accompanied the death was extreme, and it took me a while to recover. But after a few weeks, I started forming the idea of this post in my head and gradually, it took shape there. Once the one month anniversary of the death passed, I felt I was ready to write again. First, I started with more professional, simple tweets. Then I began working on professional writing deliverables. Eventually I took the leap here. At another point in time, I’ll write about the amazing person my father was. Right now, I’m not quite ready to do that. I could write volumes, and I’m not the only person who feels that way.

Blogging is about sharing and baring a little bit more of oneself than in traditional journalistic articles, so rather than just ticking off a how-to article about various ways to deal with death online, it felt more appropriate to put the lessons I learned through this experience into the personal framework so that it might be more helpful to others. We all lose loved ones at some point. It’s unavoidable and it hurts deeply. But we have a choice when these things happen to us. We can wallow in the depths of our worst nightmares or we can find ways to pull ourselves out. Sometimes it’s too difficult to talk about these things, yet a short e-mail message or Facebook post can return immense warmth, and each note of kindness allows us to find a little more acceptance.

We all grieve differently – some more privately than others – and as I was told, there is no right or wrong way to experience grief. It’s just something that must be done in order to heal and move forward. While it may seem like a huge leap to share personal tragedies in an online forum, it’s almost always worth the risk. There’s a reason the word “community” is used so often in the social media world. Now I believe more than ever that those who lean on their online communities for support when they most need it will benefit much more in the long run.